Ronald Dworkin Quotes & Sayings

Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands. — Ronald Dworkin

Moral principle is the foundation of law. — Ronald Dworkin

Discretion, like the hole in a doughnut, does not exist except as an area left open by a surrounding belt of restriction. It is therefore a relative concept. It always makes sense to ask, "Discretion under which standards?" or "Discretion as to which authority? — Ronald Dworkin

Integrity is the key to understanding legal practice. Law's empire is defined by attitude, not territory or power or process. — Ronald Dworkin

Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs. — Ronald Dworkin

What is shocking and wrong is not [Lord Devlin's] idea that the community's morality counts, but his idea of what counts as the community's morality. — Ronald Dworkin

Death has dominion because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying - the emphasis we put on dying with 'dignity' - shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we have lived it. — Ronald Dworkin

Balanced' is a code for 'denied': a right to free speech that must be 'balanced' against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them. — Ronald Dworkin